1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a driven axle assembly with wheel hubs being driven with different rotational speeds. For this, the axle assembly comprises an axle housing with a main drive, wheel hub units fixed to both sides of the axle housing and being driven by a drive shaft with different rotational movements on both sides of the main drive, within each wheel hub unit, a planetary gearing and a multi-plate friction type wet brake both being coupled to the drive shaft as well as to a drive unit of the vehicle, wherein the multi-plate friction type wet brake is arranged within a ring gear support member, and around planetary gears of the planetary gearing a ring gear is connected to them.
2. Description of the Related Art
U.S. Pat. No. 5,088,967 describes a driven axle assembly of heavy duty vehicles such as muckshifters, mining machines, agricultural power machines and vehicles for handling and transporting materials, which has a planetary gearing and a multi-plate friction type wet brake. This solution is able to cope with the high loads and stresses applied on driven axle assemblies of vehicles as mentioned above, thus there are quite widely spread solutions.
The driven axle assemblies of this type, however, are not suitable to applications in driven axles with steering appliances. It is not unusual, that these kind of heavy duty vehicles have caterpillar or rubber creepers or belts instead of conventional wheels, and these creepers are driven for moving the vehicle. In these cases, the heavy duty vehicles are steered with different movement of the creepers which is reached by different rotational speeds of the creeper drivers on both sides of the vehicle. Often is this known solution be used with vehicles having conventional wheels, wherein the wheels themselves rotate with different speed, during the steering action.
In summary, the previously known solutions providing different rotational speeds on both sides of the vehicles are not suitable for applications under heavy duty conditions but, as mentioned above, the need to overcome this disadvantage is quite urgent.